This Friday, June 21, 2013 is NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's 30th birthday and there's a worldwide solidarity party going down at a time and public place of your choosing. Here are a few ideas to help you celebrate.
Surveillance Cupcakes
How about these eye-catching cupcakes?
Say Cheese!
Get a small magnetic board and some alphabet fridge magnets, then get people to spell out their birthday wishes. Snap a picture and upload to your favourite information-sharing portal.
Mask-erade
Turn some heads and stay safe from state surveillance by concealing your identity under a costume.
Non-Molotov Cocktails
Spice up your favourite mixed drink with a home-made cocktail umbrella. Just download the templates and print. Cut out the circles, tape to make a cone and stick on the end of a toothpick or skewer.
Make some noise
It's not a party without some tunes so bring some amplified music or instruments to make your own.
Serena Williams and Steubenville: A lesson in responsibility
If you've been anywhere near the news lately I'm sure you're familiar with Steubenville. I've been blogging about the situation unfolding around the rape of a young girl last summer – the ensuing investigation, finger-pointing, Occupation, lawsuits, trial, convictions and public and media reactions – for six months now and the underlying issues just won't go away.
I'm compelled to write today because of the recent controversy caused by tennis star Serena Williams' comments in a Rolling Stone article and her subsequent apology. Serena Williams is the number-one tennis player in the world. In the article, she is described as "the most dominant figure in sports today". I wonder about her sense of perspective from her now-priveliged position.
"Lots of my friends have been telling me lately that I'm spoiled," Serena says with a baffled look on her face. "And I'm like, 'Really? I'm not spoiled.'"
Let's take a look at what she actually said:
"Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don't know."
It's a valid question, and Serena is not alone in asking it. At a really simple, abstract level, we have two young boys imprisoned for raping an intoxicated girl. They did something stupid, not only in raping her but also in spreading digital evidence of the rape on social media, and now they are facing the consequences of that. Those consequences are one and two-year sentences to be spent at a private correctional facility, receiving some of the best rehabilitation services for juvenile sex offenders available to them.
Are those consequences fair? We can argue on philosophical high ground for eternity but down here on planet Earth, reality is messy. To answer Serena's question we need to understand the dynamics of peer pressure, power and trust within this group of young people. We need to understand that this girl thought she was among friends, that she trusted certain people at that party to look out for her, to respect her, and that she had that trust violated in the most horrific way.
We need to understand that she was unconscious and un-consenting when the boys she thought would at least respect her basic human rights tried to prise open her mouth so they could enter her – and when that failed, slapped their limp members on her vacant body – showing off to their peers.
"I'm not blaming the girl, but if you're a 16-year-old and you're drunk like that, your parents should teach you: Don't take drinks from other people.
What good can this clusterfuck of advice do under those circumstances? Serena begins with "I'm not blaming the girl, but" – and of course, what follows is Serena blaming the girl. What's not clear is what she's blaming her for. Is it being "drunk like that"? Or is Serena actually blaming the girl's parents for failing to teach her not to take drinks from strangers, without any way of knowing whether they ever instilled this wisdom into their daughter or even whether she heeded it that fateful night?
By "not blaming the girl" and then placing blame on the victim for getting "drunk like that" or her parents for not teaching her to "take drinks from other people", Serena is taking the focus of blame away from the rapists. By doing this, she is actually making the world a more unsafe place. It's our collective reaction to rape and rapists – how much we tolerate them or not – that determines how many of us have to suffer the torment of being raped in our world.
What Serena should have said was: "I'm not blaming the girl. If you're a 16-year-old you have no idea how easy it is to get drunk like that. Your parents should teach you how to be responsible with alcohol so that you don't end up in a vulnerable position. Even so, being drunk like that is not an invitation to sex."
"She's 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn't remember?"
Why was she that drunk where she doesn't remember? Well, it's because she had a blood alcohol content of 0.20% or more (or as low as 0.14% if she was an inexperienced drinker).
Let's say she's a 110lb 16-year-old girl. Just three or four drinks could cause her to black out.
"It could have been much worse. She's lucky."
This is by far the most careless and cutting remark in the whole article. Of course it could have been much worse, much worse happens to people every single day. That doesn't mean she's lucky. This callous comment makes a molehill out of a mountain of human suffering. It's also adding to the mountain.
"Obviously, I don't know, maybe she wasn't a virgin, but she shouldn't have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that's different."
Here's another clusterfuck of a sentence. Again, Serena is cautious. By this point it's obvious that she doesn't know, but she's careful to remind us anyway. She quickly follows with another sequence of non sequiturs, beginning with "maybe she wasn't a virgin".
In the previous clusterfuck, Serena conflated date rape with the dangers of drinking when you're sixteen and have no real idea where your personal limits are. Heck, I'm twice the girl's age and I still get surprised on occasion by my body's reaction to alcohol. At sixteen I had absolutely no frame of reference.
I do have a frame of reference now, for my reaction to alcohol and many other things. My frame of reference regarding rape myths shifted dramatically once I realised I actually unwittingly believed many of them myself, and worse, by doing so I was actively contributing to people getting raped.
In her position as a public figure, Serena is spouting support for some of the most insidious of these myths. "Maybe she wasn't a virgin" is the beginning of one, but Serena quickly slips into another: the idea that if "they slipped her something, then that's different" to if she was unconscious as a result of her own actions.
Imagine you're unconscious. It's difficult to do, right? But imagine that gap between when you fall asleep in the evening and when you wake up in the morning. All sorts of stuff probably happened that you have no idea about: a mosquito stung you, a bug crawled over your face, the cat stared at you for two hours, that sort of thing.
Maybe someone came into your room and peeled away the covers, lifted your shirt and snapped some pictures of you lying there, exposed. Maybe they touched you a little, not enough to wake you but enough that if you were awake you'd be feeling deeply invaded. I mean, obviously, I don't know, maybe you're not a virgin. Maybe you would have liked it. You were unconscious, so who knows?
Now, sleep is something we have to do: it's a biological response. In this way, it's just like the biological response to being "slipped something" that causes you to lose consciousness. Sleep is also something we can choose to do: we have some control over when we sleep, how deeply, where and so on. In this way, it's similar to putting yourself "in that position" of being unconscious.
So when you find those pictures of your sleeping, naked body being circulated among friends and strangers, does it really matter if you were unconscious because you were overcome by sleep or because you put yourself "in that position" by indulging in sleep at that place and time?
Does it matter WHY you couldn't say no, or THAT you couldn't say no?
Serena fixates on the idea that "she shouldn't have put herself in that position" and it's easy to see why people sympathise with the notion of personal responsibility. Being able to take responsibility for yourself – your own actions and wellbeing – is one of the hallmarks of adulthood, and it's easy to forget that we're not talking about adults here.
But there is another hallmark of adulthood that many of us have yet to fully achieve: being able to take responsibility for others. There was only one "dead girl" there that night, but tens if not hundreds of others witnessed her in that vulnerable state. She was clearly incapable of taking responsibility for herself and more worryingly, those tens if not hundreds of others were incapable of taking up that burden of responsibility for her.
We do need to teach and learn how to take responsibility for ourselves, but more importantly, we need to teach and learn how to take responsibility for others.
Serena Williams (and we all) would do well to learn and teach more of both.
Hanging in the balance: Steubenville's hacktivist and the scales of Justice
I was stunned to find out that the activist responsible for initiating #OpRollRedRoll – essentially a publicity campaign in support of the Steubenville Jane Doe – had been raided by a SWAT team and was under investigation by the FBI. Stunned, but perhaps not surprised.
The man known to me previously under various online aliases as KYAnonymous has since been named as Deric Lostutter, a 26-year-old from Winchester, Kentucky. According to his story, he potentially faces a sentence that could eclipse those being served by the rapists he helped to expose.
I choose my words carefully here because I do not want to perpetuate the myth that the rape only came to light through the alleged hacking exploits of KYAnonymous and JustBatCat (because it did not) or through Alexandria Goddard’s blogging (because it did not).
Yes, there was hacking: a website in connection with the local high-school football team was temporarily defaced then knocked offline; some email accounts (notably that of the fan website’s administrator, Jim Parks) were hacked and the contents leaked and publicised.
And yes, blogging and tweeting helped to spread awareness about the case and stimulated a global debate about rape culture with a focal point in the USA.
And now, Deric Lostutter is the first of the “good guys” to take a hit.
Again, I choose my words carefully here because I do not want to perpetuate the myth that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” when in fact there are simply people, who all do things that they and others perceive as being good or bad to varying degrees.
This is one of those situations where one needs to pause and take a step back to gain some perspective. Followers of this blog will know that I have been covering the events unfolding around the rape of a teenage girl by Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond since December 2012.
In fact, it was #OpRollRedRoll that really caught my eye. I suddenly understood what Anonymous was all about and how it could be used as an immensely powerful memetic force within the digital space. It was a realisation that I believe Deric had himself some months before.
I’m not surprised that the FBI raided Deric Lostetter’s house, confiscated computer equipment and that he is under investigation. I’m also not surprised that he faces criminal charges if it can be proven that he committed or abetted the hacking of http://www.rollredroll.com/ and the email accounts of its webmaster, Jim Parks.
The hack itself has been publicly claimed by JustBatCat, another activist and hacker who is not a member of Anonymous and who was heavily involved with OpRollRedRoll for some time before distancing himself.
Many people are now questioning the situation Deric finds himself in. There is even an online petition that calls for the FBI’s investigation to be dropped immediately. It seems so terribly unjust that this man, who many feel did a heroically good thing in bringing publicity to one girl’s plight and thereby shedding light on the oldest of crimes, is now being persecuted for a much more modern phenomenon: computer crimes.
Justice is a word that has been bandied around a lot in relation of Steubenville. Many things were said and done in the name of Justice. At one point, a faction of Anonymous even started a #JusticeSec.
Jane Doe got justice. She reported her rape and saw the perpetrators sentenced by a court of law for their crimes against her. She lost some friends-that-never-were and gained a legion of women and men who care about her more than she will ever know. She will never again know a life in which she was not raped and she can choose to turn tragedy into opportunity, to turn violation into revelation.
Trent and Ma’lik also got justice. Vilified for their reprehensible crimes, these boys-not-quite-men will receive some of the best rehabilitation and educational services for juvenile sex offenders available to them in the area. They too will never again know a life in which they were not rapists and they too can choose to turn it around.
Steubenville is in the process of getting justice. Suffering primarily from self-induced shame exacerbated by a severe case of media overload, the population of Steubenville is experiencing a sort of catharsis with the ongoing Grand Jury process. Grievances are being aired and the fractured community is beginning the slow process of healing and re-annealing.
Which leaves Deric Lostutter. An investigation by the FBI (possibly as part of the Steubenville Grand Jury investigation) seemed almost inevitable, which is why I was stunned but not surprised to find out about it. However, I am concerned about the Justice of this situation.
Of course, like Truth, Justice is multifaceted: there are many Justices that cannot really be assembled into a cohesive whole. Nonetheless, we try.
We try to construct Justice through our legal systems, through our political systems, through our educational and spiritual systems. We try to construct Justice through our own lived experiences and those we observe around us. And out of this quagmire emerges some semblance of Justice, and all too often we all too readily accept it as such.
In this case, the Justice we are being asked to accept involves weighing the suffering of a young girl being raped and humiliated by her friends and peers against the suffering of a man who had his electronic privacy compromised and his hobby interrupted.
The weight of they young girl’s suffering has been set at three years of two young men’s lives,while the weight of the man’s suffering seems to be around ten years of another young man’s freedom.
Immediately we see that this justice seems imbalanced.
When we consider that Deric Lostutter, the man who may pay the price for Jim Parks’ invasion of privacy, may not even be the perpetrator of this crime the balance tips even further from being level.
And that’s ignoring any possibility that our scales of Justice themselves may be rigged to be uneven (which, incidentally, is what #OpRollRedRoll was actually all about – and which takes on even more significance in light of the recent NSA whistle-blowing fiasco).
When we see Justice as anything other than a tool we have at our disposal and complete control, something that is malleable and must be shaped to fit the situation while retaining a perfect sense of objective balance, we are lost.
When the mechanisms and machinations of Justice detract from its use as a tool to shape the world we live in into a more level, balanced place, we are doomed.
There is no question that Deric should explain his actions when asked to do so in the name of Justice. There is no question that he should suffer the consequences of any crimes he has committed, for that is Justice.
The question is how we measure those consequences and define that suffering; how we exact Justice.
Step 5 – Why evolution isn't random or irreducibly complex
Read:
Step 1 – Why Darwin is not the ultimate authority on evolution
Step 2 – What evolution says about God
Step 3 – “Survival of the fittest” and why evolution doesn’t always promote survival
Step 4 – Natural selection is not the only way evolution bears fruit
Step 5 – Natural selection is entirely random, leads to ever-greater complexity, limitlessly creativity, or violates the second law of thermodynamics
Life itself appears to be extraordinarily unlikely, yet here we are. As explained in Step 2, evolution itself says very little about how life came to be here in the first place. Evolution simply explains how life forms change over time under the influences of random mutations and selective pressures (see Step 3 & Step 4).
The mutations that drive these changes happen in a number of ways. The one we perhaps most associate with the word mutation is the one behind the powers of comic book superhero the Hulk. Bruce Banner, a shy genius scientist, first transforms into the Hulk after being irradiated by a gamma bomb he invented while saving a youth who had wandered onto the testing range.
Gamma rays (and other forms of radiation such as ultraviolet light) can indeed damage DNA in such a way that can cause mutations in the sequence of nucleotide building blocks that make up the genetic code. Chemicals such as carcinogens can also cause such changes. To understand the genetic code and how it can be broken we must understand that there are essentially two languages that sing the song of life.
One is the language of nucleic acids, by which we generally mean DNA and the related molecule, RNA. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, while RNA stands simply for ribonucleic acid. These molecules are made up of building blocks known as nucleotides, which contain special information-encoding components called nucleases (or just bases, for short).
The other language is that of proteins, which are essentially a huge class of molecules that act as machines and scaffolds throughout the living world. Proteins themselves are made up of building blocks known as amino acids. When you hear about hair, skin or nail treatments containing amino acids or things like silk or milk proteins, it's because your hair, skin and nails are all built around protein scaffolds known as keratins, while milk and silk are both also largely composed of other proteins.
These amino acid building blocks string together in a sequence that folds up into a particular shape. Like any machine or scaffold, the shape it has is the key to what it does and how it does it. So the sequence of letters that make up the "word" of a protein spell out its distinctive shape.
The language of genes is nucleotides and the language of proteins is amino acids. The genetic code itself works in such a way that three nucleotide bases spell out one letter of the protein alphabet. Which letter it is depends on the order of bases in the nucleotide "triplet".
There are four bases to choose from (represented by the letters G, A, T and C in the image below) so we have 64 possible combinations. The protein alphabet only has 20 letters (since there are only about 20 amino acids that form building blocks for proteins) so some of the base "triplets" mean the same thing. We also need signals to start and stop decoding a message.
The genetic code
Read the wheel from the inside out to decode the triplets and find out which of the 20 amino acid letters is being encoded.
When we talk about a mutation, what we mean is a mistake in the nucleotide language of bases that causes one triplet to suddenly become another.
Enough of these changes caused our unfortunate Banner to turn into the Hulk, or so the story goes. Apart from gamma rays and other radiation, mutations can also just happen spontaneously as a result of their chemistry. At the molecular level, our genetic information finds itself in an ever changing chemical environment. A number of chemical reactions, such as tautomerism, depurination and deamination can cause mutations to be introduced.
Part of this complex chemistry of life is the process of duplicating genetic information. This process is facilitated by special proteins called DNA polymerases.
In general, DNA polymerases are extremely accurate, making less than one mistake for every 100,000,000 nucleotides added. Some DNA polymerases even have the ability to proofread and can remove nucleotides to correct mismatched bases. However, other DNA polymerases are able to "read through" certain kinds of mutations, at the expense of accuracy in error-free regions. The overall result is that DNA replication and even maintenance processes can introduce mutations.
All these different sources of mutation have one thing in common: the mutations they produce are entirely random. But while mutation is random, which mutations survive is not.
The accumulation of one mutation after another over a long enough time, and under the influences of various selective pressures (see Step 3 & Step 4), can produce such stunningly complex systems that they seem impossibly unlikely to exist. As such, evolution can be viewed as a kind of "improbability drive" that makes the apparently impossible extremely likely, and it does so all in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics is the branch of science concerned with heat and its relation to energy and work. There are various famous laws of thermodynamics, which define fundamental physical quantities (temperature, energy, and entropy) that characterize thermodynamic systems, and describe how these quantities behave.
The second law of thermodynamics is often stated as famously read by German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius in a presentation at the Philosophical Society of Zurich on April 24, 1865:
The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
Another way of expressing this law is that entropy – a measure of randomness – cannot decrease in a isolated system. This means that a thermodynamically isolated system (one in which no matter or energy can be exchanged with its surroundings) will progress to a point of maximum chaos.
Our planet is not a isolated system. Therefore the bizarre introduction of order that we see in the spirals of snail shells or the regular arrangement of fronds on a fern are perfectly in harmony with the laws of physics.
These islands of order in a swell of chaos are a result of life's remarkable battle against entropy through the transformation of energy from one form to another. Plants and photosynthetic bacteria transform energy from the sun into the energy they need for life in the form of sugars and starches. Other kinds of bacteria transform energy from chemical sources. We and many other life forms transform energy from biological ones.
So if life can keep entropy at bay, can evolution produce limitless complexity? And why hasn't the two-way radio ever evolved as a biological feature? The fact that there are nanoscale radio receivers suggests such structures are within what it is possible to construct with our biological building blocks.
New Scientist explains:
"The answer might be that half a radio really is useless. Detecting natural radio waves - from lightning, for instance - would not tell animals anything useful about their environment. That means there will be no selection for mutations that allow organisms to detect radio waves. Conversely, without any means of detecting radio waves, emitting them would serve no useful purpose."
So evolution is limited by what is biologically possible (in terms of the chemicals we have to build life with and how their properties relate to their functions). It is also limited by the paths it can take, as in the example of the two-way radio.
So going back to our evolutionary golf-course, we see that some of the mounds are inaccessible and some are simply mirages that lie outside the realms of possibility.
But what about within what's left of our golf course? If we now imagine a thousand golf balls jittering about our evolutionary landscape, does evolution mean that they will all end up sitting on top of different hills? And does that mean that evolution leads to ever greater complexity?
Evolution is a process. Our understanding of this process takes into account the fact that evolution itself (and its various complex outcomes) arise out of the dynamic interaction of life with its environment over time. This interaction has both random and directional components.
In many cases, complexity may initially arise when natural selection is weak or absent. In such situations, mutations that are effectively "neutral" (such as duplicate copies of a gene that encodes a protein for making a particular pigment) could spread as a result of random genetic drift. This increase in genomic complexity, which does not come at the expense of fitness, provides yet another opportunity for mutations to accumulate. In turn this paves the way for greater phenotypic complexity to arise through the various processes of evolution.
But just because our evolutionary golf course may be infinitely complex in terms of possibilities (within the given physical and biological constraints of life-as-we-know-it) doesn't mean that an individual journey through that landscape – over millions of years – will be. Or indeed the collective sum of many journeys.
Earlier, we discussed why a two-way radio would never be likely to evolve. New Scientist goes on to explain:
"The contrast with visible light could hardly be greater. It is clear that simply detecting the presence or absence of light would be advantageous in many environments, that even a blurry picture is better than nothing at all, and so on right up to hawk-eyed sharpness."
So while the peak representing evolutionary fitness for detecting radio waves might be inaccessible, the peaks for detecting light are not only accessible but when we examine it closely we see that there are in fact a number of different peaks around that area.
The eye represents one example of a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. This is where evolution ends up with similar genotypic or phenotypic solutions for a given environmental problem.
The problem of detecting light has been solved by evolution countless times and in countless ways. Perhaps the most celebrated of these is the camera eye. The camera eye can be found in cephalopods (such as squid) and vertebrates like ourselves. This kind of eye evolved from a common ancestor who most likely only had a very simple light-sensitive spot. Evolution led to the progressive refinement of this structure into the camera eye now found in a huge variety of different species with one subtle difference: in contrast to our own vertebrate eyes, the cephalopod eye is wired in the opposite direction, with blood and nerve vessels entering from the back of the retina, rather than the front.
Natural selection often leads to ever greater simplicity.
If you're not using it, then it's making you less fit because you're wasting energy that you could be using somewhere else, so you tend to lose it. It's why the appendix has been lost up to six times. It's why cave fish don't have eyes and why tapeworms don't have guts.
Evolution doesn't have an overall goal, nor can we truly predict what it will churn out over the years. Going back to our evolutionary golf course, we can't really say what's beyond the horizon nor exactly where our golf balls will go. But we can say that some hills are seemingly inaccessible and others are perhaps more likely. So evolution is neither entirely random nor irreducibly complex.
Coming soon…
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment and such beliefs as:
• Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality.
Evolution in 7 steps: Step 4 – Natural selection is not the only way evolution bears fruit
Read:
Step 1 – Why Darwin is not the ultimate authority on evolution
Step 2 – What evolution says about God
Step 3 – “Survival of the fittest” and why evolution doesn’t always promote survival
4. Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection, or natural selection is the only means of evolution.
This misconception is easy to understand, given the misunderstandings around what we actually mean by "natural selection" and the related concept, "survival of the fittest". Earlier, I wrote about what natural selection (also called purifying selection) is, and how it is one particular mechanism by which life can evolve.
There are also others:
Disruptive selection (also called diversifying selection) describes changes in population genetics in which extreme values for a particular trait are favored over intermediate values: the population becomes divided into two distinct groups. This evolutionary process is believed to be one of the main driving forces behind sympatric speciation (which we'll come to later).
Directional selection occurs when a certain characteristic has a greater fitness than others, leading it to become more frequent. This process can continue until the characteristic is fixed and the entire population shares the fitter feature.
Stabilising selection (not to be confused with natural selection) lowers the frequency of characteristics that have a negative effect – that is, produce organisms of lower fitness. This process can continue until a particular characteristic is eliminated from the population.
Finally, a number of forms of balancing selection exist, which maintain a characteristic at intermediate frequencies in a population. The image below illustrates some of these diverse mechanisms in terms of the distribution of a characteristic within a population.
Different changes in population genetics as a result of various selective pressures:
We tend to assume that all characteristics of plants and animals are adaptations that have arisen through natural selection. In fact, many features we observe are neither adaptations nor the result of selection at all.
Much change is due to random genetic drift rather than positive selection; it could be called "survival of the luckiest".
Genetic drift occurs because the features of a generation of offspring are a sample of those features in the parent population, and because chance has a role in determining whether a given individual survives and reproduces. In other words, genetic drift happens due to the effect of random sampling. The effect of random sampling and genetic drift is illustrated by the following experiment involving coloured beads.
Random sampling and genetic drift:
To simulate a single generation, we pick one bead at random from the original jar. Whatever colour the bead is, we take a new bead of the same colour and put it in the second jar (returning the original bead to the first jar). We do this until we have filled the second jar with the same number of beads.
By the time we have reached the fifth generation, there are no red beads left in the jar: the red characteristic has disappeared from the population.
This is purely the effect of random sampling and genetic drift – no natural selection necessary.
Evolution also passes through "population bottlenecks" – random external events such as natural disasters that cause a sudden reduction in population size. Bottlenecks can result in radical changes in the frequencies of particular characteristics, completely independent of any kind of selection.
There's also a special kind of bottleneck known as the founder effect, which is illustrated by the following diagram:
If the two founding populations are separated enough and for a long enough time, random mutations, genetic drift or selective pressures may act on them to create entirely distinct species. Again, there are various ways in which such separation can occur. Anything that interferes with or prevents the exchange of genetic information can cause such separation, so new species can even arise within the same geographic region via sympatric speciation.
The apple maggot, Rhagoletis pomonella, may be currently undergoing sympatric speciation. Between 1800 and 1850, after apples were first introduced to North America, an apple-eating variant emerged from the hawthorn-eating maggot population. The apple-eating race no longer normally feeds on hawthorns, and the hawthorn-eating race does not normally feed on apples. This may be an early step towards the emergence of separate species.
So species evolve due to the accumulation of a number of different random events and natural selection is certainly not the only means of evolution. Moreover, not all evolutionary adaptations are beneficial. We can see that not everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection, but that characteristics arise through the interplay of various kinds of selective pressures and other forces such as genetic drift.
Read Step 5 – Why evolution isn’t random or irreducibly complex
Evolution in 7 steps: Step 3 – “Survival of the fittest” and why evolution doesn't always promote survival
Read:
Step 1 – Why Darwin is not the ultimate authority on evolution
Step 2 – What evolution says about God
3. “Survival of the fittest” justifies “everyone for themselves”, or evolution always promotes the survival of species.
"Survival of the fittest" is a concept often discussed in relation to evolution, but what does it actually mean?
The phrase originated as an alternative description of "natural selection", so let's first understand what that means. Wikipedia provides an excellent definition:
Natural selection is the gradual, non-random process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution. The term "natural selection" was popularized by Charles Darwin who intended it to be compared with artificial selection, which is now called selective breeding.
Natural selection remains one of the cornerstones of the synthesis of ideas that encompass our modern understanding of evolution.
In order to discuss evolution, natural selection and "survival of the fittest", we must first understand two important concepts in biology: genotypes and phenotypes.
We describe the genetic makeup of a cell, an organism, or an individual as it's genotype. So when we talk about genotypes we are talking about unique collections of genetic information.
A phenotype is the composite of an organism's observable traits: visible appearance, development, physiological properties, behavior, and the products of behaviour (a bird's nest or human clothing, for example). Phenotypes arise from the interaction between a particular genotype and its environment.
Another important concept to grasp is that evolution and natural selection are not the same thing.
Evolution refers to an entire framework of understanding of how life evolves, and natural selection is one aspect of that understanding.
In other words, evolution can happen in various different ways and natural selection (also called purifying selection) is one particular mechanism by which life can evolve.
It's easiest to explain natural selection in reverse, so we must begin by accepting three things:
Mutations happen.
Mutations can be reflected in an organism's physical characteristics.
Natural selection acts on an organism's physical characteristics.
The results of natural selection are that functional genetic features – such as genes or regulatory DNA sequences – are conserved over time. This happens because of selective pressure against any variations that have negative consequences for an organism.
We can see evidence of this in many places but histones are a great example. Histones are microscopic protein particles that act as spools for DNA and are thus vital for allowing large genomes to fit inside small cell nuclei. When we examine histones from different species, there is remarkably little variation. Histones have presumably reached a point where most mutations result in histones that are less-good spools for DNA and therefore less-good for being alive as that particular organism. Histone structures (and the genetic information that encodes them) have been conserved over time because they are so fundamentally important to being alive for all cells with a nucleus.
Only after the integration of Darwin's theory of evolution with a complex statistical appreciation of Gregor Mendel's 're-discovered' laws of inheritance did natural selection become generally accepted as an explanation for how life can evolve.
Natural selection and "survival of the fittest" are intended to be synonymous. Today, both are widely misunderstood. In particular, "survival of the fittest" is often used in a way that is incompatible with the original meaning intended by its first two proponents: Herbert Spencer (who coined the term) and Charles Darwin.
Spencer was a British polymath and philosopher, and a contemporary of Darwin's, who first used the phrase after reading On the Origin of Species. Spencer penned Principles of Biology in 1864, drawing parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological ones:
"This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection', or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."
Indeed, originally – and perhaps more accurately – the phrase used was:
"survival of the best fitted".
Where Spencer coined the phrase as an analogy for natural selection in the context of economics, Darwin then borrowed it to describe biology again in later editions of On the Origin of Species. It is not a scientific description, but a metaphorical one:
"survival of the better adapted for immediate, local environment".
"Fitness" in this sense bears no relation to physical fitness. The "fittest" can be the most loving and selfless, not the most aggressive, selfish or physically capable. In fact, the term "fitness" has a very distinct definition within the context of evolutionary biology.
We can discuss the fitness of a given individual, or of a particular characteristic or trait. We can also discuss the fitness of a population or even an ecosystem. Fitness is often defined as a probability or a tendency for reproduction, rather an actual number of offspring. The reason for this is illustrated by a quote by evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith:
"If the first human infant with a gene for levitation were struck by lightning in its pram, this would not prove the new genotype to have low fitness, but only that the particular child was unlucky."
So when we talk about the evolutionary fitness of populations or particular traits within them, we must talk in the language of mathematics, statistics and probabilities. Luckily, there are easier ways to do this than with equations and formulas.
First conceptualised by Sewall Wright in 1932, a fitness landscape is a way of visualising fitness in terms of a multi-dimensional surface. We can thus visualise the evolutionary process playing out on a three-dimensional landscape.
Picture a golf course, where the height of the ground indicates fitness, while the east/west and north/south directions each represent one particular characteristic or feature.
In this game of evolutionary golf, the ball represents a given population. Our evolutionary golf ball jitters along of its own accord, making random movements in response to an invisible wind: the random occurrence of mutations in genetic information, which result in a constantly fluctuating reservoir.
A peculiar tendency of this evolutionary golf ball is that it likes to move uphill. As soon as it gains a little traction, the random movements drive it up the nearest incline. This is because peaks correspond to local areas of high fitness and with each random movement in the right direction it moves a little higher.
It is often said that natural selection always progresses uphill but can only do so locally. Our evolutionary golf ball usually – but not always – climbs the nearest hill, regardless of whether or not it's the highest one. And once it's at the top it is – usually, but not always – trapped there.
Sometimes, a hill will gradually or spontaneously disappear and return the golf ball to the valley so that it can begin another climb. More often than not, our evolutionary golf ball is sat atop an unspectacular mound for a good long while, even if it's right next to a mountain.
The result is that suboptimal local adaptations become stable, because the return to the less-fit valleys of the landscape on the way to higher peaks is blocked by the "fitness" that has already been accumulated. The upshot is that natural selection does not imply that everything will always become fitter.
In fact, evolution sometimes results in individuals or populations becoming less fit and may occasionally even lead to extinction. This is because natural selection can take place at different levels: at the level of genes, individuals, or groups such as populations and ecosystems.
What promotes the survival of a particular mutation or gene does not necessarily increase the fitness of the individuals carrying it, or of groups of these individuals. For example, parasitic DNA elements called transposons can spread through a population even though they make their host organisms less fit. In humans, transposons cause diseases such as the blood-disorder haemophilia, which was one of the first genetic diseases ever described.
Selfish individuals may thrive at the expense of altruistic individuals in a group, even though they make the group as a whole less fit. In 1932, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane suggested that this could even lead to the extinction of entire populations in a phenomenon called evolutionary suicide. Models and some experimental evidence suggest that he was right.
So evolution doesn't always promote the survival of any given individual or species, and "survival of the fittest" certainly doesn't justify "everyone for themselves".
Read Step 4 – Natural selection is not the only way evolution bears fruit
Evolution in 7 steps: Step 2 – What evolution says about God
Read Step 1 – Why Darwin is not the ultimate authority on evolution
2. The theory of evolution says something about God, or evolution says something about how life came into being, or religion and evolution are incompatible.
This is a big myth, and it's not hard to see why. Thinking about evolution raises lots of questions regarding the origins of life. Darwin himself struggled with the implications of his ideas and how they meshed with the religious doctrines of his time and his own personal beliefs.
On the Origin of Species was published during the papacy of Pope Pius IX. The First Vatican Council was held in 1869, a decade after Darwin published his theory, and includes a section on faith and science:
"10. Not only can faith and reason never be at odds with one another but they mutually support each other, for on the one hand right reason established the foundations of the faith and, illuminated by its light, develops the science of divine things; on the other hand, faith delivers reason from errors and protects it and furnishes it with knowledge of many kinds."
Evolution doesn't address God in any way, nor does it offer an explanation of how life came to exist in the first place. Those fall under the domains of theology and biopoiesis, respectively.
The theory of evolution simply offers a way to explain how genetic information propagates and results in the various life forms we see around us.
Thus, evolution is only incompatible with certain beliefs in religious doctrine, not with the notion of divinity itself. This is perfectly illustrated by the following graphic, from The MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, released at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/survey.html in February, 2013.
Read Step 3 – “Survival of the fittest” and why evolution doesn’t always promote survival
I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings about what evolution is, what "survival of the fittest" means, and what Darwin has to do with it all (or is it that Dawkins guy?).
This post is my attempt to clear up some of the confusion.
So who was Charles Darwin and what exactly is his theory of evolution? Let's begin to answer this question by examining some of the myths surrounding evolution that are propagated by people on both sides of the fence regarding evolution's validity.
Here are some of the misconceptions that I've come across:
Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution, or Darwin's theory of evolution is what we mean when we talk about evolution today.
The theory of evolution says something about God, or evolution says something about how life came into being, or religion and evolution are incompatible.
"Survival of the fittest" justifies "everyone for themselves", or evolution always promotes the survival of species.
Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection, or natural selection is the only means of evolution.
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity, limitlessly creativity, or violates the second law of thermodynamics, or evolution is an entirely random process.
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment and such beliefs as:
• Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality.
• Accepting evolution undermines morality.
Evolution is only a theory, or evolution cannot be disproved so is not science. Nobody has ever seen evolution happen and such questions as:
• If humans came from apes, why aren’t apes evolving into humans?
• If evolution is true, why are there so many gaps in the fossil record?
1. Let's start with Darwin and his theory of evolution. I will show you why Darwin's theory of evolution is not the same as the one we have today, and therefore why his theory is not the be-all-and-end-all of evolution.
However, before we begin, let's take a little look at the evolution of evolution itself over the last 1000 years or so.
Our timeline begins with the first detailed description of way certain diseases are inherited, followed by a long period in which plant breeders contributed much towards our understanding of inheritance. This understanding sparked some innovative ideas that continue to be refined into what we understand as the theory of evolution today.
The evolution of evolution
If you're having trouble viewing the timeline you can also see it here
The eight-year-old Charles Darwin already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by his Anglican preacher in 1817. At the age of 16, he spent the summer as an apprentice doctor before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
Soon bored with his tutor's course, Darwin neglected his medical studies in favour of the radical ideas of the Plinian Society, a student natural history group. Here Darwin was astonished by his mentor's support for Jean Baptiste Lamarck's ideas on the transmutation of species, after having read similar notions in his own grandfather's journals.
Angered by the neglect of his studies, Darwin's father sent him off instead to Christ's College, Cambridge, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican parson. In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree.
After graduating, the 22-year-old Darwin returned home on 29 August to find a letter proposing him as a suitable gentleman naturalist for a self-funded place on the HMS Beagle. Thus began a voyage that would lead Darwin to begin discrediting Lamarck's theory of evolution in favour of his own.
It would take until 1859 for a 50-year-old Darwin to publish his ideas On the Origin of Species. They are meticulously worded: in the first edition of the book he makes a strong case for common descent, but avoids the controversial term "evolution", which would be included in later editions. His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that:
"light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."
Darwin states his ideas succinctly in the introduction:
"As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive;
and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence,
it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself,
under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form."
At the end, he concludes that:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved."
Over the last 150 years, Darwin's theory of evolution has itself evolved in line with our growing understanding of the world around us. The key developments in our understanding of evolution are shown in the timeline above. We now understand the molecular basis of evolution and are also beginning to understand how it exerts its effects – not only at the gene level but also on the level of entire populations and ecosystems.
150 years' worth of scientific endeavour have produced a bounty of evidence in support of Darwin's original theory, and also additional evidence that builds on or corrects his initial ideas and those of others that followed.
So when we talk about evolution today, we are not talking about the theory that Darwin wrote down in 1859. Instead, we are talking about a mature framework of evidence-based understanding of how life works.
The Efé are a group of hunter-gatherer people living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Efé children often play a game known as Osani.
You play Osani by sitting in a circle, feet touching, all connected. Each player in turn names a round object like the sun, the moon, a star, an eye and then goes on to name a figurative expression of roundness the family circle, a baby in the womb, or the cycle of the moon. As players fail to come up with a circular term they are eliminated from the game until only one player remains. Tradition has it that this player will live a long and prosperous life, and it's not hard to see how that could ring true.
This image is often shared in combination with the concept of ubuntu, a Bantu word for an African philosophy and way of life. Ubuntu has been explained in many different ways:
“Africans have a thing called ubuntu. It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world. It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the extra mile for the sake of another. We believe that a person is a person through other persons, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. Therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu
"A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food and attend him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects."
–Nelson Mandela
One particular story that is often associated with the image is the following:
"At the Festival of Peace, in Florianopolis, South Brazil, the journalist and philosopher Lia Diskin related a beautiful and touching story of a tribe in Africa.
She explained how an anthropologist had been studying the habits and customs of this tribe, and when he finished his work, had to wait for transportation that would take him to the airport to return home. He'd always been surrounded by the children of the tribe, so to help pass the time before he left, he proposed a game for the children to play.
He'd bought lots of candy and sweets in the city, so he put everything in a basket with a beautiful ribbon attached. He placed it under a solitary tree, and then he called the kids together. He drew a line on the ground and explained that they should wait behind the line for his signal. And that when he said "Go!" they should rush over to the basket, and the first to arrive there would win all the candies.
When he said "Go!" they all unexpectedly held each other's hands and ran off towards the tree as a group. Once there, they simply shared the candy with each other and happily ate it.
The anthropologist was very surprised. He asked them why they had all gone together, especially if the first one to arrive at the tree could have won everything in the basket - all the sweets.
A young girl simply replied:
"How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?"
The anthropologist was dumbfounded! For months and months he'd been studying the tribe, yet it was only now that he really understood their true essence..."
[SOURCE]
Imitating the photographer, Sudan
From I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb
"Ubuntu: I am what I am because of who we all are.”
– Leymah Gbowee, Liberian peace activist
Maasai dancers, Kenya
From I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb
A world of sheep and lambs, infiltrated by wolves, led by hawks, owned by fat cats, policed by pigs, being freed by rats, doves, owls, larks and bookworms.
I didn't really want to write about Dzhokhar Tasarnaev, the only one of the two men accused of being the Boston Bombers still alive. His story is already being told elsewhere, by a wide variety of conflicting and contradictory sources. I didn't want to write about him mainly because I have already published my thoughts on the Boston Marathon and the bombing.
Earlier, I wrote about turning things upside down. The same principle can be applied here. Dzhokhar is the man who did the Boston Bombings. Now upside down: the Boston Bombings were done by Dzhokhar, the man. Immediately the focus shifts from Dzhokhar-the-perpetrator to Dzkokhar-the-man. This provides two different frameworks within which Dzhokhar and the Bombings can be discussed.
So I guess I won't write about Dzhokhar, but instead I will write about Jahar, as he is known to his friends and supporters. Let me make one thing clear at this point: I do not support Jahar in the sense that I condone what he is accused of, nor do I think he is entirely innocent. However, I support Jahar's rights as a human being in the same way that I support the rights of every other being on this planet. That includes the right to live.
Jahar violated that right for at least three people (four if we include his brother, Tamerlan, whom he allegedly ran over in a desperate bid to escape capture; and five if we include the MIT campus police officer, who he may or may not have shot). Whether this is simply the result of two angry young men or whether it was part of a larger operation involving the US government or other forces remains to be determined. It seems fairly clear at this point, from the crowd-sourced pictures in the public domain combined with the media narrative, that Jahar did – at least – position at least one bomb.
We condemn Jahar for his lack of compassion: how could he do such a thing? But should we not then turn the other cheek and show him compassion where he showed none? Should we not educate him in the ways of the world? Ways that – one would hope – are not just based on the philosophy of an eye for an eye?
Jesus himself forgave a mass-murderer, Saul of Tarsus, who was responsible for persecuting hundreds of Christians and who, around the age of 25, had an epiphany and converted himself to become Paul the Apostle.
Without that act of forgiveness we would be down an Apostle; and the course of our collective history would be forever changed.
I recently had a confrontation with my younger cousin on Facebook. He was trying to make the point that rejoicing in any death is wrong (in reference to the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher). He chose to do so by posting a satirical statement rejoicing in the deaths of those killed in the attack at the Boston Marathon. I had to point out that when trying to make a point about discrediting a certain behaviour (like rejoicing in someone's demise, or killing people, for example), it's usually best to avoid using exactly the thing you are trying to discredit in your argument.
I read today that "a large majority of Americans support the death penalty for the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing should he be convicted in federal court." From this, we can assume one of two things: either a large majority of Americans are being foolish, like my cousin, or they are simply out for cold-blooded revenge. Foolishness can be forgiven; after all, to err is human. But cold-blooded revenge?
In Jahar we have a person with a mere nineteen years of experience in this world who is at odds with much of the rest of it. So at odds, in fact, that he found it acceptable – no, imperative – to kill innocent people.
The question, as ever, is why?
In order to answer it, we must examine what turned this young man to be so askew. We must ask the difficult questions that might lead to uncomfortable truths. We must be brave, and we must be balanced.
Already, there are disturbing accusations that, if true, show Jahar's rights as a US citizen and human being have been gravely violated. There has already been some public debate over whether Jahar should have been advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In fact, Tsarnaev wasn't Mirandised because the Department Of Justice decided that he should be.
"Instead, that happened only because a federal magistrate, on her own, scheduled a hospital-room hearing, interrupted the FBI's interrogation which had been proceeding at that point for a full 16 hours, and advised him of his right to remain silent and appointed him a lawyer. Since then, Tsarnaev ceased answering the FBI's questions."
I didn't really want to write about Jahar because I am more disturbed by the events that unfolded around him as a consequence of his actions than the bombing itself, and because the bombing itself disturbed me deeply.
That someone could commit such an act does not concern me so much as how we could allow someone to become so lost as to commit such an act.
There is a Bantu word that encapsulates an African philosophy:
Ubuntu: "I am what I am because of who we all are."
Read more about ubuntu
What Jahar did to those people hurt us – as a collective – deeply, yet it is a reflection of what we have done to him. If we kill him for his crimes, how will that reflect back on us?
Even if the lethal injection is as painless as it is supposed to be, he will feel pain: the pain of waiting to die, knowing the exact time and place, of counting the minutes with his loved ones, of saying goodbye to a future he will never know, letting go of his talents, his knowledge, his thoughts, his connections to this world and to others. How will we feel that pain if we condemn him to this? How will we respond to his suffering?
Emotions have a similar quality to energy: they can be released, stored, transmitted and transmuted. When those bombs exploded, the Tsarnaev brothers did not simply unleash a hail of metallic shrapnel: the emotional fallout was much greater than any physical damage. The broiling firestorm of emotional energy that surrounds the story is chaotic and contradictory. So how will it respond when events take their course?
I didn't want to write about Jahar because I think that what I have to say about him will be very difficult for many people to understand. I have no answers for these questions but I do believe that what affects one of us affects us all. I can't say that any death, in an of itself, contributes any joy to the world.
Life is complicated, complex, inestimable and ineffable. It seems so extraordinarily unlikely, and even if it's not, the chances of you being exactly as you are, are so unfathomably impossible that you may as well marvel at the uniqueness of you. And of course, the same thing is true for everyone and everything else. So we must marvel at Jahar's uniqueness, and try to understand what tarnished its beauty and why.
Turn it around: the art of looking up (and upside down)
"Look up."
This was a revelation, imparted to me by a friend during a difficult time in my life. Yet, he mean it literally. So, heeding his advice, every time I walked through the familiar streets around my home town, I looked up.
And you know what? I discovered a whole other city that had been hiding in plain sight. I discovered jokes and poetry scrawled high up on walls, art and architecture hidden from the eyes of ground-level gazers.
Looking up literally turned my world upside down.
Turning something upside down. It is perhaps the simplest of all mathematical transformations: a rotation of half a circle about a point. Yet turning something upside down is transformative in wholly different ways as well.
Turning something upside down is the best life-hack I know. It allows us to instantly switch perspective. Because looking at something upside down makes it unfamiliar, it allows us to examine it again afresh and from a different angle. This allows us to spot things that we may not otherwise have seen.
Because that change in perspective happens to put us at the polar opposite angle to that we were looking at before, turning something on its head is a great way to eliminate bias and to promote empathy between conflicting viewpoints.
A groundbreaking film about communities on the frontline of coal & gas expansion in Aus.
"The Mining the Truth Documentary is on the verge of completion but we need your financial support to take it over the line. Help us finish this great new doco about communities on the front lines of coal and gas expansion in Australia."
"Our mission for the Steubenville Project is to be a community garden that improves the neighborhood by bringing people together to grow and donate food, improve diet, educate and inspire, provide therapy, grow produce, and strive to better our community."
